YES2 / Fotino (2007)

10 years after YES, the successor, the Young Engineers' Satellite 2 (YES2) was flown. The YES2 was a 36 kg student-built tether satellite part of ESA's Foton-M3 microgravity mission. The YES2 satellite employed a 32 km long tether to deorbit a small re-entry capsule "Fotino."

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At an altitude of 260 to 300 kilometres a half millimetre thick, thirty kilometre long tether was to be rolled out below Foton. This is so long, that the tether will even be visible from Earth in the night sky (from South America and eastern Russia).

At the end of the tether hangs the spherical re-entry capsule Fotino (the parcel). Gravity will cause Fotino to swing forwards and back to the vertical. At exactly the right moment the Fotino is released from the tether and the slingshot places the capsule on a path towards the Earth's atmosphere. A heat shield protects the experiment against the same heat the Space Shuttle faces during its return to Earth and Fotino will use parachutes to prepare for a soft landing.

The YES2 satellite was launched September 14, 2007 from Baikonur. Although the capsule was lost because the communications system failed, deployment telemetry indicated that the tether deployed to full length and that the capsule presumably deorbited as planned. It has been calculated that Fotino was inserted into a trajectory towards a landing site in Kazakhstan (the capsule was not recovered).